Technology allows Santa Fean to autograph books for fans from afar

Local author George R.R. Martin signed autographs Saturday at the annual Book Expo America conference and exhibition in New York City. Nothing unusual about that; Martin’s fantasy series The Song of Ice and Fire has attracted a huge fan base.

Except he wasn’t in New York.

He was in Santa Fe.

Martin sat in his office here and signed copies of the first volume of Dreamsongs, a collection of his short stories, for fans in New York through a device called the LongPen. He held a stylus and went through the motions of signing on a pad. A pen held in an armature in New York followed that motion, inscribing his name on a book held in a frame. He also chatted with fans through a video-conferencing system.

“It was cool,” he said Saturday afternoon. “It was like those videophones in those old science-fiction stories.”

The signing began at 9 a.m. MST, or 11 a.m. in New York. A technician came to Martin’s office about an hour before and set up the system. The connections between author and pen are made through the Internet. Martin said there were no glitches, and the event went smoothly.

The publisher was giving away about 75 copies of the book at the New York event. The book is scheduled to be released in October.

Asked Thursday if he thought the signing system put a wall between him and his fans, he said, “I don’t see it that way. I’ll be talking to the fans, having conversations. I won’t have to take all that time to fly to New York for an autographing session. Instead, I’ll just take a couple of hours here.”

Martin is the author of The Song of Fire and Ice series, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, which was on the bestseller lists for a while when it came out in 2006. Other books include Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag and Tuf Voyaging. But the LongPen was only set up to autograph copies of Dreamsongs at the book expo.

During regular face-to-face autographing sessions, he said, most fans will have copies of his latest book, “but at the end of the line, there’ll be someone with grocery bags filled with everything I’ve written. This won’t work for them.”

A press statement from the makers of the LongPen say it was invented by Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood, from Vancouver, British Columbia, also is signing books for fans from afar this weekend, as are Dean Koontz from California; Diana Gabaldon from Scottsdale, Ariz; and Douglas Preston from Maine. The statement claims a writer who doesn’t have to fly to New York from London and back saves more than a ton of carbon-dioxide emissions.

The BEA is an annual event for booksellers across the United States. It attracts big names to give speeches, this year including Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA analyst who recently moved to Santa Fe.

Martin pointed out that this wasn’t his first high-tech encounter this week. On Thursday night, he was the star attraction at a virtual bookstore in Second Life, an online shared-community site. Visitors can visit an entire virtual town at the site in the form of avatars, electronic representations of themselves. Martin said the site ran a contest to see which character from his books the participants would like to see as an avatar to represent him. The dwarf Tyrion Lannister was chosen. So he appeared at the bookstore and read from one of the books and chatted with other avatars. No autographs, though; the site isn’t set up for that. Yet.

Both experiences have made Martin think about the changing times.

“It’s a brave new world,” he said.